The universe’s hungriest black hole eats three suns per week, Spanky is jellus

Scientists at the Australian National University have discovered the Universe’s fastest-growing black hole, a monster that gobbles up a mass the same size as Earth’s Sun once every two days. The black hole, which appeared to have the mass of 20 billion suns at the time its light was emitted, is growing by around one percent every million years.

The black hole is so far away that the light the astronomers measured was emitted around 12 billion years ago, during the earliest days of the Universe. “We don’t know how this one grew so large, so quickly in the early days of the Universe,” said Dr Christian Wolf from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

We’re lucky that the black hole is billions of light-years away, or the radiation emitted would destroy any life in our galaxy. “If this monster was at the centre of the Milky Way it would likely make life on Earth impossible with the huge amounts of x-rays emanating from it,” Dr Wolf said in a release.